A place for a tired old woman to try to figure things out so that the world makes a bit of sense.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

The Poor Are Still With Us

Cartoon by Lee Judge and published January 7, 2014.

The Los Angeles Times has a pretty good column on the War of Poverty and the claims that it was a failure and was/is a waste of government money. Ann Stevens and Marianne Page take issue with

that nonsense and provide statistics to back their thesis up.

"First, careful studies confirm that many of the safety net programs initiated with the War on Poverty, such as Head Start, WIC and food stamps (now called SNAP), make a big difference in the lives of the poor. Recent research by economists Hilary Hoynes, Douglas Almond and Diane Schanzenbach shows, for example, that the introduction of the food stamp program improved infant health, especially in high poverty areas where participation rates were highest. Similar benefits have been found for WIC, and for cash-based anti-poverty programs. Gordon Dahl and Lance Lochner have shown that increases in the size of the earned income tax credit are associated with improvements in low-income children's achievement test scores.

These safety net benefits go unrecognized because our official poverty statistics do not measure such noncash or after-tax benefits, nor do they track real outcomes, like improvements in health or education. But the benefits are there, and they need to be taken into account, especially when cuts are being proposed." (Emphasis added)

Until the people who keep the statistics start paying attention to those government programs and the real-life effect on people's lives, those in the GOP and the DINOs will continue to justify the heartless moves they've been making (e.g., not extending unemployment benefits).